Feature

THE NEW NORMAL IS MORE NORMALIZED CENSORSHIP

Project Censored’s Top 10 Stories Show Old Patterns Alive and Well

By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor

PROJECT CENSORED’S CO-

directors, Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth, title their introduction to this year’s edition of State of the Free Press, “A Return to News Normalcy?” drawing a direct parallel between our world today to that of post-World War I America, “When the United States faced another raging pandemic and economic recession,” with other sources of tumult as well: “The United States then had experienced a crackdown on civil liberties and free speech in the form of Espionage and Sedition Acts; racial tensions flared during the Red Summer of 1919 as violence erupted from Chicago to Tulsa; Prohibition was the law of the land; and the first wave of US feminism ended with the passage of the 19th Amendment.” At the time, they noted, “People yearned for a return to ‘normalcy,’ as then–presidential hopeful Warren G. Harding proclaimed.”

But it was not to be. “The desire for simpler times, however, was more a phantom than a reality, as millions of Americans ultimately had to adjust to an ever- and fastchanging world,” including a rapidly changing media landscape — most notably the explosion of radio. And we should expect much the same. Every major change in the media landscape has brought with it the promise of expanded horizons and democratic possibility — the potential for a broader, more inclusive public conversation — only to see many of the old patterns of division, exclusion and demonization recur in new ways as well as old, as recent revelations about Facebook vividly remind us.

Project Censored isn’t alone in drawing parallels to a century ago, of course. The pandemic above all has expanded journalistic horizons, as a matter of necessity. To a lesser extent, the threat to American democracy — part of a worldwide trend of democratic backsliding — has done so as well. But though some have expanded their horizons, many more continue as if little or nothing has fundamentally changed. Day-to-day news stories perpetuate the fantasy that normal has already returned. And in one sense they’re right: The normal patterns of exclusion and suppression that Project Censored has been tracking for over 40 years continue to dominate, with even the latest wrinkles fitting into well-established, if evolving, broad patterns that are depressingly familiar.

These patterns are reflected in Project Censored’s top ten list, with two stories each about labor struggles, racism, threats to health, the environment and free speech. Yes, that’s 12 stories, not 10, because some stories fit into more than one pattern — and some readers will surely find more patterns as well.

Several stories this year deal with topics that have gotten widespread attention — but with aspects that have been virtually, or entirely ignored. The number one story, for example, deals with prescription drug costs, a widely covered story, but with a significant difference in focus: how much those costs translate to in lost lives. The number nine story deals with police violence against people of color, but with a new focus that’s actually quite old: vicious police dog attacks. The number four story deals with climate change, again with a different focus: how heavilyindustrialized nations like the U.S. “have effectively colonized the global atmospheric commons for the sake of their own industrial growth.”

The point of Project Censored has never been just to expose significant stories that have been ignored, but rather to expose them as portals to a wider landscape of understanding and action. In that spirit, here is our summary of this year’s top ten censored stories:

Prescription Drug Costs Set to Become a Leading Cause of Death for Elderly Americans “Soaring prescription drug costs have been widely reported by corporate news outlets,” Project Censored notes, but they’ve utterly ignored the staggering resulting cost in human lives. More than 1.1 million seniors enrolled in Medicare programs could die prematurely in the next decade due to unaffordable prescription drugs, according to a November 2020 study reported on by Kenny Stancil for Common Dreams. “As medicines become increasingly expensive, patients skip doses, ration prescriptions, or quit treatment altogether,” Project Censored explained, a phenomenon known as “cost-related nonadherence,” which will become “a leading cause of death in the U.S., ahead of diabetes, influenza, pneumonia, and kidney disease” by 2030, according to the study by the nonprofit West Health Policy Center and Xcenda, the research arm of Amerisource-Bergen, a drug distributor.

“[E]ven with Medicare insurance, what seniors pay is linked to a drug’s price,” the study explained, which allowed them “to model how cost-related nonadherence would change under policies that would reduce drug prices, such as Medicare negotiation.” The study focused on five medical conditions that “significantly affect seniors and for which effective pharmaceutical treatments are available,” including three types of heart disease, chronic kidney disease, and type B diabetes.

“The good news is that policy changes can curb the power of Big Pharma, resulting in far fewer avoidable deaths,” Stancil reported. “Medicare negotiation is projected to reduce drug prices and seniors’ costsharing, which could prevent nearly 94,000 seniors’ deaths annually and save $475.9 billion,” the study stated as one of its key findings.

“As a model for policymakers, the study pointed specifically to the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act (H.R. 3),” which passed the House in December 2019, but died in the Senate, Project Censored noted. It’s been reintroduced after Joe Biden “declined to include Medicare negotiation in his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan proposal,” they explained.

A May 2021 op-ed in the Hill, co-authored by Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt), cited the studies figures on preventable deaths and explained its basic framework:

H.R. 3 would limit the annual out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries to no more than $2,000, and would establish a top negotiated price for drugs at no more than 120 percent of the average of six other wealthy nations….

H.R. 3 would support and protect innovation and new drug development by investing some of the expected savings into the world-class research funded through the NIH.

But this op-ed was a rare exception.“The public’s understanding of the debate surrounding H.R. 3 and other proposed legislation designed to control inflation in prescription drug prices ought to be informed by accurate information about the grim repercussions of continuing the status quo,” Project Censored noted. “Sadly, the corporate media have failed to provide the public with such information for far too long, and the consequences could turn out to be deadly for millions of seniors.”

Journalists Investigating Financial Crimes Threatened by Global Elites Financial crimes of global elites, involving the flow of dirty money through some of the world’s most powerful banks, have made major headlines in recent years, most notably with the Panama Papers in 2016 and the FinSen Files in 2020. But we’d know a great deal more if not for the flood of threats faced by journalists doing this work — a major story that hasn’t been told in America’s corporate media, despite a

A Ray of Hope in Dark Times

By Terelle Jerricks, Project Censored Managing Editor

Project Censored” has been a tough sell since its inception in 1976. Identifying the most important stories of each year on the basis of the exposure that was denied to them by forces beyond the first amendment is a pretty reliable recipe for disillusionment. Nonetheless, the doomy gloom that seeps into my mood when Project Censored is released every autumn is partly my fault. Inevitably, my focus is on the top 25 censored stories and the chapter on Junk Food News, where the same storylines tend to reemerge. The same backstories, too, often feature journalists who wind up dead as a result of their work.

The work is never-ending. There’s always another foe attempting to stand in the way of trustworthy news reporting. But over the past few years, Project Censored is doing more to report on what work is being done to support quality journalism and the fight against fake news, false narratives, and willful manipulation of the public. The result is a budding optimism in dark and depressing times in the wake of the Donald Trump administration.

Project Censored’s executive directors, Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth have long argued that “critical media education — rather than censorship, blacklists, privatized fact-checkers, or legislative bans — is the best weapon for fighting the ongoing fake news invasion.”

Project Censored’s annual list of 25 censored stories makes up the book’s lengthy first chapter, and the chapters looking at what happened to previously listed censored stories and examples of news abuse and junk food news, are still one of the best resources one can have for critical media education. However, the chapters reporting on the work of training up new generations of news consumers and journalists equipped with critical media literacy and efforts to transform the news media financing model from one dependent on capitalism to a publicly financed utility is the bright spot in the latest edition of State of the Free Press.

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

It’s been five months since Project Censored went to press with the 2022 edition of State of the Free detailed report from Foreign Policy Centre (FPC), “Unsafe for Scrutiny,” released in November 2020.

The report was based on a survey of 63 investigative journalists from 41 countries, which found that 71% had experienced threats and/ or harassment while doing their investigations, with a large portion of those (73%) experiencing legal threats as well. Its findings were described by Spencer Woodman in an article for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

“The report found that legal threats are chief among the types of harassment facing journalists conducting financial investigations, and often seek to exploit a skewed balance of power between oftenunderfunded reporting enterprises and the legal might of attorneys hired by the world’s wealthiest people and corporations,” Woodman wrote. “Focusing on frivolous cases known as ‘strategic lawsuits against public participation,’ or SLAPPs, the report asserts that such actions ‘can create a similar chilling effect on media freedom to more overt violence or attack.’” Legal threats are often communicated via private letters, “and, if successful in achieving their aim, the public will never know,” the report said.

Physical threats and online harassment were also a grave concern, but they were geographically uneven. “While no journalists surveyed in North America reported physical threats, 60% of respondents working in sub-Saharan Africa, and 50% of respondents from North Africa and the Middle East region reported threats of physical attack,” Woodman noted. Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered by a car bomb in Malta in October 2017, but he added, “The report asserts that an assassination is often not a starting point for those seeking to silence reporters but instead a crime committed after a pattern of escalating threats, noting that Caruana Galizia had faced numerous legal threats and actions and that her family is still fighting 25 lawsuits over her reporting.”

Project Censored noted Galizia’s murder along with that of Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak, adding that “According to FPC’s report, an additional thirty reporters from Brazil, Russia, India, Ukraine, Mexico, and other countries who were researching financial corruption have been murdered since 2017.”

As for legal threats, “Unlike Canada, Australia, and certain US states, the United Kingdom has not passed anti-SLAPP legislation, making its courts an attractive venue for elites seeking to use the law to bully journalists into silence,” Project Censored noted, citing a May 8, 2021, Guardian column by Nick Cohen which described the UK’s court system as “the censorship capital of the democratic world.” Cohen in turn cited the case of financial reporter Catherine Belton, author of the 2020 book, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West. “As Cohen explained, in response, a host of Putin’s super-wealthy associates are now bombarding Belton with one lawsuit after another,” Project Censored observed.

The silence about this silencing has been deafening, Project Censored noted. There has been some coverage overseas, but “To date, however, no major commercial newspaper or broadcast outlet in the United States has so much as mentioned the FPC’s report.”

Historic Wave of Wildcat Strikes for Workersʼ Rights After millions of people were designated ‘essential workers’ when the U.S. went into lockdown in March 2020, thousands of wildcat strikes erupted to challenge dangerous working conditions and chronic low wages, exacerbated by refusal to protect against COVID-19 and cutting or sharply increasing the cost of medical insurance, for those who had it. A further strike surge was driven by “Black and Brown workers using digital technologies to organize collective actions as a way to press some of the demands for racial justice raised by Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protestors,” Project Censored noted. The nation’s fourth busiest port, Charleston, S.C., shut down during George Floyd’s funeral on June 9, for example.

At the labor news website Payday Report, Mike Elk created a continuously updated COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map, which had identified “1,100 wildcat strikes as of March 24, 2021, many of which the corporate media have chosen to ignore,” according to Project Censored, including “more than 600 strikes or work stoppages by workers in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement,” in June 2020 alone, according to Elk.

“While local and regional newspapers and broadcast news outlets have reported on particular local actions, corporate news coverage has failed to report the strike wave as a wave, at no time connecting the dots of all the individual, seemingly isolated work stoppages and walkouts to create a picture of the overarching trend,” Project Censored reported.

The sole exception where there was national coverage was in August 2020 when highly-paid baseball and basketball pro athletes walked out in violation of their contracts to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake by Wisconsin police. The coverage ended quickly once they returned a few days later.

Wildcat strikes occur when workers simply stop working, often in response to a specific incident, such as employer actions putting lives at risk by skimping on protective gear or attempting to cut workers’ healthcare. The situation was exacerbated by the Donald Trump administration’s failure to issue mandates requiring specific safety measures, as reported by Michael Sainato at the Guardian.

Examples covered by Elk that Project Censored cited include:

In Santa Rosa, California, 700 healthcare workers went on strike because their hospital lacked sufficient personal protective equipment to keep employees safe, and management warned employees that their insurance fees would be doubled if they wanted continued coverage for their families.

In St. Joseph, Missouri, 120 sheet metal workers went on strike due to management’s repeated attempts to cut their healthcare benefits during the pandemic.

In May 2020, workers at 50 McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks, and other fast food establishments throughout Florida staged a daylong strike for higher pay and better protective equipment.

In April 2021, employees at Chicago-area Peet’s Coffee & Tea locations staged a coordinated work stoppage along with the Fight for $15 campaign to demand workplace protections and quarantine pay.

Furthermore, Elk noted that the 600 strikes in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement “is likely a severe underestimation as many non-union Black and Brown workers are now calling out en masse to attend Black Lives Matter protests without it ever being reported in the press or on social media.”

Elk also noted that “[M]any black workers interviewed by Payday Report say that, once again, white labor leaders are failing to understand non-traditional organizing that has developed from

viral social media movements…. Instagram automation and similar automation on Facebook and Twitter help to build a huge following for grassroots movements, so something that had no following a month ago can suddenly go viral and reach millions of people within hours or even minutes.”

That threat empowers even solitary individual workers, Tulsabased Black filmmaker and activist Marq Lewis told Elk:

He says he personally knows of multiple examples of black workers in Tulsa approaching their bosses without the support of a union and winning changes in their workplace.

“A lot of people may say this is not a strike, well, you tell that to these workers now who are getting their grievances heard,” Lewis says.

That’s the censored story within the story within the story.

“Climate Debtor” Nations Have “Colonized” the Atmosphere The United States and other developed countries in the global north are responsible for 92% of all the excess carbon dioxide emissions driving global warming, according to a study in the September issue of The Lancet Planetary Health. The U.S. alone was responsible for 40%, followed by Russia and Germany (8% each), the United Kingdom (7%), and Japan (5%).

The study’s author, economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, told Sarah Lazare, of In These Times, that his research began from the premises that “the atmosphere is a common resource” and that “all people should have equal access” to a fair share of it. He calculated each nation’s fair share of a sustainable global carbon budget, based on population, along with an analysis of “territorial emissions from 1850 to 1969, and consumption-based emissions from 1970 to 2015.” In turn, this was used to calculate “the extent to which each country has overshot or undershot its fair share,” according to the study. Thus the above list of the largest climate debtors.

The results, he told In These Times, show that “the countries of the Global North have ‘stolen’ a big chunk of the atmospheric fair-shares of poorer countries, and on top of that are responsible for the vast majority of excess emissions… [T]hey have effectively colonized the global atmospheric commons for the sake of their own industrial growth.”

In contrast, the study found that “most countries in the Global South were within their boundary fair shares, including India and China (although China will overshoot soon).” The leading climate creditors to date are India (34% of global “undershoots”), China (11%), Bangladesh and Indonesia (5% each) and Nigeria (4%).

“High-income countries must not only reduce emissions to zero more quickly than other countries, but they must also pay down their climate debts,” the study said. “Just as many of these countries have relied on the appropriation of labour and resources from the Global South for their own economic growth, they have also relied on the appropriation of global atmospheric commons, with consequences that harm the Global South disproportionately.”

“Other studies and analyses have pointed to the disproportionate responsibility of the Global North, and wealthy countries, for driving the climate crisis,” Lazare noted. Most dramatically, a 2015 study by Oxfam International “found that the poorest half of the world’s population — roughly 3.5 billion people — are to blame for just 10% of ‘total global emissions attributed to individual consumption,’ yet they ‘live overwhelmingly in the countries most vulnerable to climate change.’” She reported. “In contrast, the richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for roughly 50% of global emissions.”

“Corporate news outlets appear to have entirely ignored the findings of Jason Hickel’s Lancet study,” Project Censored noted. “Although it may be imperative to act “quickly and together” to reduce carbon emissions, as Vice President Harris asserted at the April 2021 climate summit, corporate media have failed to cover Hickel’s cutting-edge research, which demonstrates that the United States and other would-be leaders in addressing climate change are in fact, as the world’s worst climate debtors, disproportionately responsible for climate breakdown.”

Microplastics and Toxic Chemicals Increasingly Prevalent in Worldʼs Oceans According to a pair of scientific studies published in the summer of 2020, microplastic particles and a family of toxic chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS have become more widespread in the world’s oceans than previously realized and have begun to contaminate the global seafood supply. The two problems are related because PFAS — a family of highly stable “forever chemicals” with more than 4,700 known members — can occur as microplastics, they can stick to microplastic particles in water, and are involved in the production of plastics.

In July 2020, a German-American study published in the scholarly journal Environmental Science & Technology revealed that PFAS — which are used in a range of products including carpets, furniture, clothing, food packaging and nonstick coatings — have now been found in the Arctic Ocean.

“This discovery worries scientists,” Project Censored explains, “because it means that PFAS can reach any body of water anywhere in the world and that such chemicals are likely present in our water supply.” This is concerning because, as Daniel Ross reported for Truthout, there are “Known human health impacts ... include certain cancers, liver damage, thyroid problems and increased risk of asthma. As endocrine disruptors, these chemicals have been linked to increased risk of severe COVID-19.”

Ross cited a number of other studies as well, noting that, “Emerging research suggests that one important pathway [for PFAS spreading] is through the air and in rainwater,” and that they had been widely detected in China, the U.S., and elsewhere.

“PFASs are probably detectable in ‘all major water supplies’ in the U.S.,” according to an Environmental Working Group study, Ross reported. “What’s more, over 200 million Americans could be drinking water containing PFAS above a level EWG scientists believe is safe, according to the organization’s most recent findings.”

The second study, in August 2020, also published in Environmental Science & Technology, came from researchers at the QUEX Institute, a partnership between the University of Exeter and the University of Queensland. They looked for and found microplastics (pieces of plastic, less than five millimeters in length — about the size of a sesame seed) in five seafood products sold in Australian markets: crabs, oysters, prawns, squid, and sardines — which had the highest concentration. Press. So I asked Project Censored’s Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth what has happened that is particularly noteworthy since the book went to press.

Their immediate answer was the continued fallout from the attempted Jan. 6 insurrection. Huff and Roth give credit where credit was due to the Washington Post for reporting on what many have called an attempted insurrection and its aftermath over the past several months in the forward of the new book.

“The Washington Post is doing some quite impressive and important investigative work on detailing what happened in the lead up to Jan. 6, which goes all the way back to planning by high-level officials all the way back to the day after the 2020 elections,” Huff said.

He continued that while they know more about what happened in greater depth, nothing has happened that requires a rewriting or rethinking of the book that was published.

Roth dovetailed Huff’s comment by explaining that not everything that corporate media does is wrong or bogus.

“It’s that it needs to be scrutinized carefully given its prevalence, its size, its reach, and influence,” Roth said. “Big papers like the Post have major resources and sometimes they dedicate them to really reporting things in the public interest like in this recent report over the weekend.” (Roth was referencing the Washington Post’s release of “The Attack: Before, During and After,” an investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and its aftermath, a three-part immersive series examining Jan. 6 and its fallout through audio, video, photography, and news reporting).

As much as Roth is willing to give the Washington Post kudos for its reporting, he also quickly reminded me that Amazon founder and multibillionaire Jeff Bezos still owns the Washington Post.

“This whole year at least the Washington Post has been very biased about not sticking it to billionaires, not taxing billionaires,” Roth said. “So again, these kinds of major news publications often speak out of both sides of a corporate mouth, but I do want to make sure we say they also do report sometimes on the public interest and when they do, they illustrate how significant a free press really is for a society like ours.”

A Pinpoint of Light in the Darkness

Huff said the thing that gives him hope is the involvement of students getting hands-on training in critical media literacy and doing the work with the understanding that when they do good work, it will have a public audience and someone beyond the teacher in their class will read and be affected by what they’ve done. Huff was speaking specifically about the students who are a part of Project Censored’s campus affiliates program, who do the initial identification and vetting research on the stories that make up each year’s top 25 list. He also noted the student involvement as researchers and co-authors in several of the chapters of the book. Roth said that for him, the hope that shines through State of the Free Press comes from those students in the affiliates program and seeing the increased awareness of the kinds of concerns that Project Censored has been raising for the past 45 years.

“And they are not alone. And there is a community of people for whom these issues of media accountability and critical media literacy are out there for them to which to belong if they so choose,” Roth said. “Both individually and collectively, this is one of the things I’m most proud of with regard to the project. It’s how the project brings people together and how under the umbrella of the project. I think we all end up maybe feeling stronger than we would if we were just acting individually.”

Huff agreed, explaining that it’s the students who are guiding the optimism reflected in State of the Free Press.

They see them go through the transformations from people who pay only modest attention to the news, or they model the habits of their families or peers, to empowered students who think for themselves and think independently about media to the degree that they are invited to become the media.

“I think that’s the optimistic part,” Huff said.

Circling back to the latest edition of State of the Free Press, Huff explains that the other thing the book does, particularly the top-25 chapter, is it celebrates the work of the “intrepid, independent journalists and the independent news outlets that make their work publicly available.”

“In a kind of glass is half-full sort of way... If we didn’t have these Intrepid independent journalists and news outlets, a lot of these stories According to the study’s lead author, as reported by Robby Berman in Medical News Today, a seafood eater with an average serving “could be exposed to … up to 30 mg of plastic when eating sardines,” about as much as a grain of rice. “We do not fully understand the risks to human health of ingesting plastic, but this new method [they used for detecting selected plastics] will make it easier for us to find out,” another co-author said. “Roughly 17% of the protein humans consume worldwide is seafood,” Berman noted. “The findings, therefore, suggest people who regularly eat seafood are also regularly eating plastic.”

Aside from the Guardian, “no major news outlet has paid attention to the topic of microplastics in seafood,” Project Censored noted, referring to an October 2020 story by Graham Readfearn, reporting on a new Australian study indicating that at least 14 million tons of microplastics are likely sitting on the ocean floor — “more than 30 times as much plastic at the bottom of the world’s ocean than there is floating at the surface.” However, the study’s co-author, Dr. Denise Hardesty, “said the amount of plastic on the ocean floor was relatively small compared to all the plastics being released, suggesting the deep-sea sediments were not currently a major resting place for plastics,” Readfearn reported. “Leaders from more than 70 countries signed a voluntary pledge in September to reverse biodiversity loss which included a goal to stop plastic entering the ocean by 2050,” he noted, but major countries including the United States, Brazil, China, Russia, India, and Australia had not signed on.

Canary Mission Blacklists Pro Palestinian Activists, Chilling Free Speech Rights Before the “critical race theory” moral panic fueled a nationwide uprising to censor discussions of race in education, there was an opposite moral panic decrying “cancel culture” stifling certain people — especially in education. But even at the peak of the “cancel culture” panic, perhaps the most canceled people anywhere in America — pro-Palestinian activists and sympathizers — got virtually no attention. Even though a wellfunded, secretly run blacklist website, known as Canary Mission, explicitly targeted thousands of individuals — overwhelmingly students — with dossiers expressly intended to ruin their careers before they even began, and which “have been used in interrogations by Israeli security officials,” according to the Forward, a Jewish publication. They’ve also been used by the FBI, as reported by The Intercept.

The website, established in 2015, “seeks to publicly discredit critics of Israel as ‘terrorists’ and ‘antiSemites,’ Project Censored noted, but its careless style of accusation has caused a backlash, even among pro-Israeli Jews. “While some of those listed on the site are prominent activists, others are students who attended a single event, or even student government representatives suspected of voting for resolutions that are critical of Israel,” the Forward reported. More than that, it reported three examples when Canary Mission was apparently retaliating against critics, including Jews.

But by far, its main targets are Palestinians, particularly activists involved with the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions or BDS movement that works to peacefully pressure Israel — similarly to South Africa in the 1980s — to obey international law and respect Palestinians’ human rights. As the Intercept reported in 2018, “While Canary Mission promotes itself as a group working against anti-Semitism, the blacklist’s effective goal is to clamp down on growing support for Palestine in the United States by intimidating and tarnishing Palestinian rights advocates with the brush of bigotry.”

While the FBI told the Intercept that it “only investigates activity which may constitute a federal crime or pose a threat to national security,” this didn’t match up with its actions. “If the FBI was concerned about criminal activity among the student activists, its agents made no indication of that in the interviews,” the Intercept reported. “They did, however, ask questions that echoed far-right propaganda about unproven links between pro-Palestine activist groups and militant groups.”

The list itself has had a chilling effect on First Amendment rights, another Intercept story reported. “A survey of over 60 people profiled on Canary Mission, conducted by the group Against Canary Mission, found that 43 percent of respondents said they toned down their activism because of the blacklist, while 42 percent said they suffered acute anxiety from being placed on the website.” Some have even received death threats.

“For many otherwise unknown activists, a Canary Mission profile is their most visible online presence,” Project Censored reported, “‘It’s the first thing that comes up when you Google my name, the claim that I’m a terrorist supporter and an extremist,’ one former activist on Palestinian issues told the Intercept.”

“Beyond Canary Mission,” Projected Censored noted, “a variety of pro-Israel organizations that seek to suppress pro-Palestinian activism have pursued litigation against chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine,” as reported in The Nation by Lexi McMenamin. A highlighted example at UCLA demanded the release of the names of speakers at a national conference, whose identities had been protected “in order to prevent them from being put on no-fly lists, potentially denied entry to other countries, or contacted by the FBI over their organizing work.” In March 2021 a California judge rejected that demand, noting that disclosure of their names “would violate their rights to freedom of association, anonymous speech, and privacy.”

Project Censored also cited a May 2021 federal court ruling that the state of Georgia cannot compel groups or individuals who contract with public entities to disavow support for the BDS movement against Israel, finding that the state’s law “places an unconstitutional incidental burden on speech.” Georgia is one of 35 states with similar anti-BDS laws or executive orders.

“Heightened violence in Israel/ Palestine in May 2021 has focused attention on powerful pro-Israel media biases in US news coverage, but Canary Mission and legal efforts to suppress pro-Palestinian activism have nonetheless received minimal corporate news coverage,” Project Censored summarized, citing a handful of exceptions, a New York Times and a Washington Post opinion, plus two New York Times articles “dating back to 2018, [that] made passing mention of Canary Mission, as a ‘shadowy organization,’” But, Project Censored concluded, “Aside from this coverage, major establishment news outlets have provided no substantive reports on the role played by Canary Mission and other pro-Israel organizations in stifling the First Amendment rights of pro-Palestinian activists.”

Googleʼs Union-Busting Methods Revealed In 2018, Google dropped its longtime slogan, “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct. In 2019, Google hired IRI Consultants, a union avoidance firm, “amid a wave of unprecedented worker organizing at the company,” as Vice’s Motherboard put it in January 2021, while reporting on leaked files from IRI that provided a disturbing picture of how far Google may have strayed in its willingness sabotage its workers’ rights. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act makes it illegal for companies to spy on employees and guarantees workers the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. “Nevertheless,” Project Censored noted, “companies like Google attempt to circumvent the law by hiring union avoidance firms like IRI Consultants as independent contractors to engage in surveillance and intimidation on their behalf.”

“[E]mployers in the United States spend roughly $340 million on union avoidance consultants each year,” Lauren Kaori Gurley reported for Motherboard, but their practices are apparently so disreputable that IRI doesn’t identify its clients on its website “beyond saying the firm has been hired by universities, renewable energy companies, auto-makers, ‘the nation’s largest food manufacturers,’ and ‘several top ten worldwide retailers,’ she reported.

“Consultants specialize in operating in the grey areas of the law,” John Logan, a Professor of Labor and Employment Studies at San Francisco State told Gurley. “They’re not quite illegal but they’re sort of bending the law if they’re not breaking it.”

“The [leaked] documents show that the firm collected incredibly detailed information on 83 Seattle hospital employees, including their ‘personality, temperament, motivations, ethnicity, family background, spouses’ employment, finances, health issues, work ethic, job performance, disciplinary history, and involvement in union activity in the lead-up to a union election,’” Project Censored noted, “including descriptions of workers as ‘lazy,’ ‘impressionable,’ ‘money oriented,’ and ‘a single mother.’”

The documents Motherboard reported on didn’t come from Google, but from two Seattle-based hospitals owned by Conifer Health Solutions, who hired IRI on the sly — a common practice.

“Tracking the union avoidance firms behind anti-union campaigns is intentionally made difficult by firms that subcontract out work to other firms that hire independent contractors to avoid federal reporting requirements laid out by the Department of Labor and shield themselves from public scrutiny,” Motherboard explained, adding that the union organizing the workers had no idea of IRI’s involvement.

“Google is not the only Big Tech company to enlist union avoidance consultants in recent years. In fall 2020 and spring 2021, employees at Amazon’s massive fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama launched a much-publicized unionization effort,” Project Censored noted. “As John Logan detailed in a lengthy article for LaborOnline, Amazon responded to the Bessemer drive by spending at least $3,200 per day on antiunion consultants Russ Brown and Rebecca Smith and by bringing in a second union-busting consulting firm,” as well as hiring “one of the largest law firms in the country specializing in union avoidance.” Employees voted more than 2-1 against joining the union, but the election was overturned for a set of eight labor law violations after Project Censored’s book went to the publisher — a decision that Amazon is appealing.

“There has been some establishment press coverage of large corporations hiring unionavoidance firms to undermine workplace organizing, mostly focusing on tech giants like Google and Amazon,” Project Censored noted, including late 2019 stories in the New York Times and Washington Post reporting that Google had hired IRI, and a Feb. 23, 2020 New York Times Magazine cover story entitled “the Great Google Revolt,” which “mentioned in passing” the use of anti-union consultants by Google and others in Silicon Valley. “However, there has been no corporate news coverage whatsoever of the sensational leaks that Motherboard released in January, and there has been very little in-depth corporate media reporting on the use of unionbusting consultants in general,” Project Censored summed up, concluding, “The documents leaked to Motherboard confirm and greatly elaborate upon what labor organizers and educators have suspected of the Pfizer Bullies South American Governments over COVID-19 Vaccine “Pfizer has essentially held Latin American governments to ransom for access to its lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine,” Project Censored reports, the latest example of how it’s exerted undue influence to enrich itself at the expense of low- and middleincome nations going back to the 1980s, when it helped shape the intellectual property rules it’s now taking advantage of.

“Pfizer has been accused of ‘bullying’ Latin American governments in Covid vaccine negotiations and has asked some countries to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases,” according to reporters at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

In one case it resulted in a threemonth delay in reaching a deal. “For Argentina and Brazil, no national deals were agreed at all,” BIJ reported. “Any hold-up in countries receiving vaccines means more people contracting Covid-19 and potentially dying.”

It’s normal for governments to provide some indemnity. But, “Pfizer asked for additional indemnity from civil cases, meaning that the company would not be held liable for rare adverse effects or for its own acts of negligence, fraud or malice,” BIJ reported. “This includes those linked to company practices – say if Pfizer sent the wrong vaccine or made errors during manufacturing.”

“Some liability protection is warranted, but certainly not for fraud, gross negligence, mismanagement, failure to follow good manufacturing practices,” the World Health Organization’s director of the Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, Lawrence Gostin, told BIJ. “Companies have no right to ask for indemnity for these things.”

During negotiations, which began in June 2020, “the Argentinian government believed that, at the least, Pfizer ought to be accountable for acts of negligence on its part in the delivery and distribution of the vaccine, but, instead of offering any compromise, Pfizer ‘demanded more and more,’ according to one we would know nothing at all about or we would know only a partial version of those stories and those are situations where ignorance would not be bliss,” Huff explained.

He further explained that part of the hope for the future is that by making people increasingly aware of the kind of so-called alternative news sources that are out there, a better future is possible as we see news that is more diverse in its definitions of what and who is newsworthy.

The Dangers that Remain

But the dangers to freedom of expression, press freedom and our democracy, remain. I asked Huff and Roth to comment on the chapter authored by Robin Anderson, “False Balance in Media Coverage Undermines Democracy: News Abuse in 2020–2021.” Anderson highlights examples of news abuse in the form of a year in review starting with the Jan. 6 insurrection. From one subhead to the next, Anderson recounted the ways the mainstream press missed the story: “Media Caught by Surprise on Jan. 6;” “Media Miss the Story of the Decade” (as it did during the Iran-Contra scandal; “Corporate Media Fail the Public Before and after the 2020 Elections.”)

Anderson would go on to narrate the failures of the mainstream press compared to the alternative press as described in the differences in reporting on police rioting at Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country. Anderson called out the mainstream press’ adoption of covering violent right-wing counter-demonstrations to BLM protests using the false-balance frame. Arguably, this “both-sideism” approach to reporting has increasingly come into vogue amongst the mainstream press since President Barack Obama’s first term in office in which there were false equivalencies in discussions of white domestic terrorism and antipolice brutality protests.

I asked Huff and Roth what we should expect if we continue down this path in which the mainstream press continues to distort reality using the false-balance framing of events.

Huff says he thinks the falsebalancing of events goes back to a long-standing journalistic commitment to objectivity. He explained that one of the ways that objectivity is specified or enacted is through notions of balance.

Huff went on to explain that there are many media scholars who have

argued how journalistic commitment to objectivity in the form of balance creates opportunities for people who manipulate journalism for their own interests.

“Because you can say, ‘Wait, there’s another side. Let me have my moment.’ And so, I think that the challenge is how do we deal with objectivity in journalism?”

Huff noted that most people want news that we can trust — news that has some sense that what we’re getting is real and not partisan.

“But the way that journalism as a profession has gone about doing that, at least in the United States, has had this loophole in it ... it’s like how we talk about software. There’s a back door that can be exploited. Balance has been the back door in the journalistic software,” Huff said.

Huff thinks that one way forward could be to go back to what it means to have freedom of expression.

“In the U.S., we’re a very individualistic culture,” Huff explained. “We tend to think of the right to free speech as my right to say what I think is right. But there is a growing movement of scholars, and activists, and others — and I would include Project Censored in this — who are saying, ‘no, we need to think of freedom of expression in terms of the right to hear, and specifically, the right to hear diverse perspectives and viewpoints.’”

Roth offers the analysis that Anderson is saying that, at least in the United States, we are emphasizing too much the right to speak versus the collective right to hear.

“That’s how you get platforms for people spouting the most hateful rhetoric and members of the press treating that rhetoric as newsworthy,” Roth said. “That’s part of how you get cancel culture.”

Roth notes that Anderson gets very specific in her discussion about how false balancing has distorted establishment news coverage of storylines such as the Black Lives Matter protest movement, the socalled stolen election, or the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt.

“She’s very specific and very concrete in the [news abuse] chapter about how establishment news’ reliance on balance has led to distorted reporting on those things,” Roth said.

Roth’s response intrigued me enough to push for further discussion about what it would look like if we lived in a paradigm in which the right of the collective of humanity to hear government negotiator,” Project Censored summarized. “That was when Pfizer called for Argentina to put up sovereign assets as collateral. Argentina broke off negotiations with Pfizer, leaving the nation’s leaders at that time without a vaccine supply for its people,” in December. “It was an extreme demand that I had only heard when the foreign debt had to be negotiated, but both in that case and in this one, we rejected it immediately,” an Argentine official told BIJ.

That same month, “just after the United States approved Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, In These Times’ Sarah Lazare filed a detailed report on the history of the pharmaceutical giant’s opposition to expanding vaccine access to poor countries, beginning in the mid-1980s during the negotiations that eventually resulted in the establishment of the WTO in 1995.

“Both globally and domestically, Pfizer played an important role in promoting the idea that international trade should be contingent on strong intellectual property rules, while casting countries that do not follow U.S. intellectual property rules as engaging in ‘piracy,’” a view they promoted to multiple business networks, shielded from wider public debate. “It was not a given, at the time, that intellectual property would be included in trade negotiations,” she explained. “Many Third World countries resisted such inclusion, on the grounds that stronger intellectual property rules would protect the monopoly power of corporations and undermine domestic price controls.”

“It is difficult to think of a clearer case for suspending intellectual property laws than a global pandemic,” and “a swath of global activists, mainstream human rights groups and UN human rights experts have added their voices to the demand for a suspension of patent laws,” Lazare noted. But Pfizer was joined in its opposition by pharmaceutical trade groups and individual companies, such as Moderna, another COVID-19 vaccine maker.

As a result, “One could make a map of global poverty, lay it over a map of vaccine access, and it would be a virtual one-to-one match,” she wrote. “Once again majority black and brown countries, by and large, are left to suffer and die.”

“Pfizer’s dealings in South America are not exactly secret,” Project Censored noted, but “As of May 2021, there has been no corporate media coverage of Pfizer’s actual dealings in South America or how the pharmaceutical giant helped establish the global intellectual property standards it now invokes to protect its control over access to the vaccine.”

Nor is this anything new, it concluded: “Big Pharma has a long, underreported track record of leaving developing nations’ medical needs unfulfilled, as Project Censored has previously documented.”

Police Use Dogs as Instruments of Violence, Targeting People of Color The use of vicious dogs to control Black people dates back to slavery, but it’s not ancient history according to an investigative series of 13 linked reports, titled “Mauled: When Police Dogs are Weapons,” coordinated by the Marshall Project in partnership with AL.com, IndyStar, and the Invisible Institute. They found evidence that the pattern continues to this day, with disproportionate use of police dogs against people of color, often resulting in serious injury, with little or no justification. Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a majorityBlack city of 220,000, is the dog-bite capital of America, with a bite rate more than double the next-ranked city, Indianapolis. According to Bryn Stole and Grace Toohey’s February 2021 report:

Between 2017 and 2019, Baton Rouge police dogs bit at least 146 people, records show. Of those, 53 were 17 years old or younger; the youngest were just 13. Almost all of the people bitten were Black, and most were unarmed and suspected by police of nonviolent crimes like driving a stolen vehicle or burglary.

But Baton Rouge is hardly alone. Approximately 3,600 Americans annually are sent to the emergency room for severe bite injuries resulting from police dog attacks. These dog bites “can be more like shark attacks than nips from a family pet, according to experts and medical researchers,” a team of five reporters wrote in October 2020, as part of a summary of the main finding of their research. Other highlights from the series included:

“Though our data shows dog bites in nearly every state, some cities use biting dogs far more often than others.” This ranged from just one incident in Chicago from 2017 to 2019 to more than 200 in Los Angeles and more than 220 in Indianapolis.

“Most bite victims are men, and studies suggest that in some places, they have been disproportionately Black.” This includes the Ferguson, Missouri police department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, where it’s been found that “dogs bit non-White people almost exclusively.”

“Bites can cause life-altering injuries, even death. Dogs used in arrests are bred and trained to have a bite strong enough to punch through sheet metal.”

“Many people bitten were unarmed, accused of non-violent crimes or weren’t suspects at all.”

“Some dogs won’t stop biting and must be pulled off by a handler, worsening injuries.”

“There’s little accountability or compensation for many bite victims,” for a wide range of reasons. “Even when victims can bring cases, lawyers say they struggle because jurors tend to love police dogs,” what’s known as “the Lassie effect.”

Though the Black Lives Matter movement has significantly raised public awareness of police using disproportionate force against people of color, police “K-9 violence has received strikingly little attention from corporate news media.” There were exceptions: In October 2020, USA Today published a Marshall Project story simultaneously with the project, and in November 2020, the Washington Post ran a frontpage story citing the Marshall Project’s reporting. In addition, NBC News covered Salt Lake City’s suspension of its K-9 program, “after a video circulated of a police dog biting a Black man who was kneeling on the ground with his hands held up.” But aside from these examples, “coverage appears to have been limited to local news outlets,” Project Censored concluded.

Activists Call Out Legacy of Racism and Sexism in Forced Sterilization Forced sterilization was deemed constitutional in a 1927 Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell, after which forced sterilizations increased

dramatically, to at least 60,000 forced sterilizations in some 32 states during the 20th Century, predominantly targeting women of color. And while state laws have been changed, it’s still constitutional, and still going on today — with at least five cases of women in ICE custody in Georgia in 2019 — while thousands of victims await restitution, as reports from the Conversation and YES! Magazine has documented.

“Organizations such as Project South, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, and the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab are actively working to document the extent of this underreported problem — and to bring an end to it.” Project Censored noted. But their work is even more underreported than the problem itself.

“During the height of this wave of eugenics by means of sterilization in the U.S., forced hysterectomies were so common in the Deep South that activist Fannie Lou Hamer coined the term ‘Mississippi Appendectomy’ to describe them,” Ray Levy Uyeda wrote in a YES! Magazine article, “How Organizers are Fighting an American Legacy of Forced Sterilization,” which begins with the story of Kelli Dillon. Dillon was a California prison inmate in 2001 when she underwent a procedure to remove a potentially cancerous growth — and the surgeon simultaneously performed an unauthorized hysterectomy, one of 148 forced sterilizations that year in California prisons, and one of 1,400 carried out between 1997 and 2010.

Dillon began organizing inside the women’s prison gathering testimonials from other victimized prisoners “and provided the personal accounts to staff at Justice Now that was laying the groundwork to petition for legislation that would ban the procedures in prisons,” Uyeda reported. She eventually sued the state of California for damages, and helped to shape legislation to compensate victims (finally passed this year) a story told in the 2020 documentary film, Belly of the Beast.

“All forced sterilization campaigns, regardless of their time or place, have one thing in common. They involve dehumanizing a particular subset of the population deemed less worthy of reproduction and family formation,” Alexandra Minna Stern wrote at the Conversation. Stern directs the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, where “Our interdisciplinary team explores the history of eugenics and sterilization in the U.S. using data and stories” — 35,000 of them so far captured from “historical records from North Carolina, California, Iowa and Michigan.”

The history was more complicated than one might expect, Stern explained. “At first, sterilization programs targeted white men, expanding by the 1920s to affect the same number of women as men. The laws used broad and ever-changing disability labels like ‘feeblemindedness’ and ‘mental defective.’ Over time, though, women and people of color increasingly became the target, as eugenics amplified sexism and racism,” she wrote. “It is no coincidence that sterilization rates for Black women rose as desegregation got underway.”

“California Latinas for Reproductive Justice is working to secure legislative change for victims of the state’s sterilization efforts between 1909 and 1979,” Uyeda wrote. It was signed into law after Project Censored’s book went to print, making California the third state with such legislation, following the lead of North Carolina and Virginia, in 2013 and 2015, respectively.

“The history of eugenics has been thoroughly researched and criticized by scholars and human rights activists, but coverage by the corporate media of the US practice of forced sterilization throughout the 20th century and into the 21st has tended to be limited and narrowly focused,” Project Censored noted. There was some corporate news coverage after the ICE forced sterilization stories emerged, but generally without “any mention of the activists resisting the practice. … Some establishment press articles on the topic of forced sterilization include comments from members of these organizations to provide context on the issue, but few spotlight the groups’ tireless organizing and record of accomplishments.” Two exceptions cited were articles from Marie Claire magazine and Refinery29, “a website targeted at younger women.” This only began to change in July 2021, as Project Censored’s book was going to print, “with the Associated Press and other establishment news outlets reporting that California is preparing to approve reparations of up to $25,000 per person to women who had been sterilized without consent.”

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diverse viewpoints was emphasized instead of an individual’s right to speak. Roth asked Huff to chime in given the number of times he has spoken on the issue, particularly in relation to today’s cancel culture.

Huff said he sides with the perspective of human rights attorney, Dan Kovalik, who is an anti-imperialist author and journalist. He wrote a book called Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture. Huff explained that it isn’t what you think it is until you read it, saying that Kovalik gets into the weeds and details to discuss cancel culture.

“I think part of this balance question that gets really tricky is what Andy was saying, that balance can be wielded as a weapon or as a back door, but we have to remember that canceling is censorship,” Huff said. “So we need to go back and take a look at the definition of censorship.”

Huff noted that the project uses the definition of censorship that goes back to 1776, which is anything that interferes with the free flow of information in a society that purports to have free press systems.

He said we need to be very careful that on the one hand the very powerful and wealthy who control the institutions, the government, the lobbyist and corporations regularly engage in varying degrees or shades of censorship and curation.

“Cancel culture tends to be more overt,” Huff explained. “It tends to be public censorship designed in a way to be punitive. We’re punishing and ostracizing for an unpopular position.”

Huff said caution is needed still, because, who gets to decide who needs to be punished and ostracized?

“We need to be very careful from right to left and in between on that weird ideological matrix that we don’t somehow slide ourselves into a rationalized position where censorship becomes not just an option, but it becomes an approach,” he said.

Roth noted that there are numerous individuals and groups on the left end of the political spectrum that engage in varying degrees of curation and censorship, and said he knows that that is something for those on the left that is a difficult thing to swallow, and an easier thing to justify.

“My bigger point and Kovalik’s bigger point is that we need to keep sight of the forest for the trees,” Roth said. “And so I’m very cautious about having people or groups or individuals be ‘canceled’ or ‘censored.’”

Roth pointed out that there are already laws against hate speech and they should be used instead of us getting distracted in a cycle of cancellation. He held up the recent backlash against the perceived transphobic comments of Dave Chappelle in his third Netflix special, The Closer. Roth noted that the current discussion is whether Chappelle had punched up or down in his commentary.

Roth argued that it shouldn’t be about Chappelle. Instead, it should be about asking what people are doing and saying. “How is it being perceived by various groups? Are there channels for these groups to convey back or have open dialogue and be heard in meaningful ways? If the answer to that is no, then we have a problem,” Roth said. “I think that is where we should be focusing. Not just the channels of power, but the conduits of communication.

Roth explained that that is part of what critical media literacy does. Critical media literacy opens channels of communication. It doesn’t advocate shutting them down.

“In other words, when I have students in class, and they bring views that maybe some people don’t agree with, is it advantageous for me to shut them down, to call them names and ostracize them? Or is it a better idea to hear them out, ask questions, understand where they’re getting their information and their ideas, and use it as an opportunity to turn it into something different.”

In this alternative, Huff says there’s the potential for a seed to be planted that will change the way that person thinks and sees the world.

“If we’re going to knee-jerk our cancellation of ideas with that, which we disagree, I think we’re on a slippery slope in the wrong direction if we want to have an open society,” Huff said.

Roth explained that this goes back to the education in critical media literacy which is preparing students to consider viewpoints that differ from their own, instead of dismissing them out of hand. He notes that that is difficult work in a society with an inequality that is pervasive, structurally based and historically rooted. It is like Huff’s visual of walking a tightrope amidst gale-force winds. Except the tightrope walker is not simply an individual, but rather individuals forming neighborhoods and whole communities, and ultimately society while on this tightrope amidst gale-force winds.

The full version of this column is available to read at clevescene.com.